64-minute piece by Antoine Beuger, composed in 2004, and beautifully realised by Apartment House. "It’s from a series of pieces I composed, each for a different number of players, from two to twenty. And the number in each piece is really important, because everything that happens can only happen in a situation where there are, in this case, six people. The question I was really involved with in this whole series was how is it to play with this particular number of musicians? It’s quite easy to see that to be two is somehow different from being three. But with five, six, seven, it becomes less easy to grasp the difference. But there will always be differences."   --- Apartment House: James Opstad (double bass) Mark Knoop (accordion) Heather Roche (bass clarinet) Mira Benjamin (violin) Joe Qiu (bassoon) Bridget Carey (viola) Artwork by Jack Vickridge   ---   Another Timbre. 2021

"Atlantis is an exhilarating listen, equally thanks to its fierce free jazz and brightly textural abstraction" Antonio Poscic, The WIRE, Feb 2020 Following closely on the heels of his ravishing solo album Tomorrow is Too Late, Stockholm-based synthesist and improviser John Chantler switches gears to unleash the stunning second album by his trio with saxophonist Seymour Wright and drummer Steve Noble, Atlantis. Chantler is well-known for his solo electronic work, which frequently explodes richly layered ambient soundscapes into visceral explosions and thrilling physicality, to say nothing of his imaginative experimentation with the organ, heard in radically transformed mode on the recent solo recording. But Chantler is equally invested in real-time improvisation and he’s developed a dazzling rapport and sound world with Wright and Noble, two of England’s most distinctive, active, and turbulent figures in spontaneous music over the last couple of decades. The pair has worked together in numerous contexts over the years, but it took Chantler to create an ongoing context for them, and since forming in 2017 the trio’s rigour and level of communication have steadily expanded.“My fantasy idea in the beginning when I wanted to do this trio was thinking about taking Derek Bailey’s role in the Topography of the Lungs trio,” he says, referring to the classic 1970 album with Evan Parker and Han Bennink. “That’s not what happened, but that was my way of imagining how I could make the synthesizer have the kind of range and ability to both comment on stuff and guide and push in certain ways, like Derek did in that group. That remains a kind of ambition even if aesthetically it doesn’t feel very close to that, but that’s how I first thought about what my role would be.” Indeed, Chantler serves as a pesky interrogator, his serrated tones and viscous globules cutting through the kinetic din dished out by Wright and Noble, and on the new album his integration is more fully realised to the point where it’s often impossible to decipher where the output of one musician ends—the sibilant bowed cymbals of Noble or the feedback-laced lines of Wright—and the pushback of another begins.The album was cut and mixed in a single day with in-house engineer Janne Hansson at Stockholm’s legendary Atlantis Studio, a facility made famous by the chart-topping albums recorded there by Abba in the 1970s, when the place was known as Metronome. Prior to entering the studio the trio spent an exhausting, all-in week rehearsing at the arts space Fylkingen—where they also played a show—in addition to playing a handful of gigs in Norway. Locked in, they discovered much different acoustic qualities at Atlantis from what they’d previously encountered. “There’s a very specific sound at the studio, and we’d been playing for a week together at Fylkingen, so we started to develop a thing that really works in that room, and then you move somewhere else, and the drums in particular sounded really different, and in some ways they had a bit more of a rock ‘n’ roll kind of feeling.” explains Chantler. Responding to that radically different, reverb-soaked ambience, he and Wright took advantage of a pair of matching Fender tube amps, charging their individual signals to match the booming, resonant sprawl of Noble’s pinpoint clatter.Compared to the group’s debut album Front and Above—a live recording of the trio’s very first performance at London’s Café Oto—which Chantler edited to emphasise the sparser expanses of the raucous, performance, the new album reveals a more open-ended spectrum, from delicate to crushing. Noble’s beautifully metallic rustling and throbbing snare bombs hang pregnantly in the air, and Chantler and Wright thicken the atmosphere with twinned abstractions, alternately ethereal and punishing. The transitions between calm and chaos are sometimes seamless, sometimes abrupt, but the full landscape transports the listener to another realm regardless of how ferocious or gentle the attack may be. As strong as the trio’s first album was, Atlantis marks a massive step forward. “The more you play together the more it starts to cohere into some kind of specific language,” says Chantler. “You start to understand the point of what a particular constellation might be.” With Atlantis there’s little doubt these three improvisers know exactly what the point of it all is, which thrillingly means that many new paths in the future have opened up.    ---   John Chantler / synthesiser   Steve Noble / drums   Seymour Wright / alto saxophone   --- RECORDED AND MIXED AT ATLANTIS GRAMMOFON AB, STOCKHOLM 24 JANUARY 2018ENGINEER: JANNE HANSSONMASTERING: STEPHAN MATHIEUPAINTINGS: LESTER WRIGHT   RECORDING SESSION MADE POSSIBLE WITH SUPPORT FROM THE AUSTRALIA COUNCIL FOR THE ARTS

Japanese free jazz saxophonist Akira Sakata meets with his long-time collaborators Giovanni Di Domenico, Jim O'Rourke and Tatsuhisa Yamamoto to release the second album under their name Bonjintan. It combines contemporary Avantgarde and Free Jazz in a beautiful way. ---Akira Sakata / sax, clarinet, voice Jim O’Rourke / double bass Giovanni Di Domenico / piano, hohner pianet Tatsuhisa Yamamoto / drums --- Recorded Jim O'Rourke at Hoshi to Niji Studio, 30th June 2018

Recorded in 2012, Musik Der 135. Aktion, Kuba captures the controversial performance from Herman Nitsch's Orgien Mysterien Theater ("Orgies Mysteries Theater") as part of the Havana Biennial art exhibition. For more than fifty years Nitsch has been an influential and striking figure of Austrian art ("Vienna Actionism"). In his Orgien Mysterien Theater Nitsch uses actors, blood, animal bodies and entrails, fruits, symbolic crucifixion, music, processions, and ritualistic gestures to enact a new form of Gesamtkunstwerk: pagan ceremonies that aim to a kind of collective catharsis. "Dionysos gegen den Gekreuzigten" ("Dionysus against Christ Crucified") was performed by 150 musicians and 30 actors, including the University's Symphony Orchestra ISA and the artist himself, celebrating Afro-Cuban rituals and ceremonies. Released In cooperation with Nitsch Foundation.

At last: the long-awaited box set surveying The Shadow Ring's prolific, decade-long existence. Eleven CDs, one DVD, and a more than 450-page book featuring a detailed biographical essay, hundreds of photographs, ten interviews, a complete discography with lyrics, and rarely-seen ephemera. The Shadow Ring (1992–2002) presents a comprehensive overview of the work produced by British musicians Graham Lambkin, Darren Harris, and later Tim Goss over the course of a decade. Throughout their legendary ten-year run, this shambolic rock outfit, formed by a group of teenagers in the port town Folkestone, were an enigmatic force on the international musical sub-underground. The group have left behind a mighty run of eight LPs, a handful of 7-inches, and a spate of raucous live shows and cryptic zine appearances on both sides of the Atlantic. Collected here for the first time are The Shadow Ring’s live cuts, rarities, and complete commercial releases, spread out across eleven CDs and a DVD, accompanied by an nearly five-hundred-page book that includes a monographic biographical survey, more than one hundred color photos, a comprehensive discography with transcribed lyrics, and a selection of zine appearances, fliers, postcards, and other miscellanea. In aggregate, this significant collection not only plums the depths of the band and its attendant lore, but reveals a vivid minor history of mail-order networks, bedroom recording sessions, cross-USA couch-surfing, and encounters with fellow travelers such The Dead C, Harry Pussy, Charalambides, Richard Youngs and the No-Neck Blues Band. Where is the connecting thread between Ralf Wehowsky and Squirrel Nut Zippers? Inquire within. The roughly 200 songs in this set trace the band from its earliest days recording in Lambkin’s parents’ house (SHP Studios), through its brooding mid-period, garnering word-of-mouth notoriety that peaked with the trio turning down an invitation to tour with Pavement, to a string of increasingly uncompromising experiments with electronics, voice, and tape. Although the band’s sound morphs considerably during this time period, from spartan beginnings using pots and pans as a drum set to their ultra-deconstructed latter-day approach, certain core sensibilities are apparent throughout: brash youthful rawness, wry and morbid lyricism, stripped-down angularity, and a penchant for atmospherics. This boxset, featuring every record and single, and buttressed by twenty-nine rarely-heard recordings, including proto-Shadow Ring projects such as the Cat & Bells Club and Footprint cassettes, and their unearthed final CD-R Darren Harris Reads Graham Lambkin, presents the first opportunity to hear this arc in full. The ebbs and flows of the band—their schoolboy beginnings, initial successes, first shows and tours, life milestones, and Lambkin’s gradual development as a solo artist—are painstakingly detailed in a sizable band history-cum-Künstlerroman by Blank Forms artistic director Lawrence Kumpf, illustrated with candid photos, sketches, letters, newspaper clippings, and other ephemera. The music and videos can speak for themselves, but taken as a mass, this collection makes sense of the group’s utter uncanniness without comprising one iota of their mystique, bringing something new to the table for completionists and the uninitiated alike.  The Shadow Ring: Graham Lambkin, Darren Harris, Tim Goss Audio transfers and remastering: Graham Lambkin with Daniel Martin-McCormick and Jade Guterman Mastering: Stephan Mathieu at Schwebung Mastering, Bonn, Germany DVD mastering: C. Spencer Yeh Design: Lucas Quigley

"Both pieces tremble with giddy energy, but also exude a calm atmosphere in their chiming overtones. In the end, flute and guitar fully unite: The former folds into the latter in a triumphant refrain that soars so high it sounds light-headed, as if Chatham is dizzied by his own playing" - Pitchfork "By layering loops of his own playing – on trumpet, guitar and flute – Chatham’s Pythagorean Dream delivers a pair of captivating, hypnotic performances" -The Guardian "By contrast (to his previous work with 100 guitars), “Pythogorean Dream” is almost shocking in its subtlety. The music has a distinctly New York feel to it. The dark, guitar-based resonance from the first part feels like the alleyways of downtown in the more foreboding ’70s and ’80s, while the serene second part evokes images of the well-groomed riverfront areas of lower Manhattan today. Chatham (although) deep into his career, has found interesting new ground in genres of instrumental music that deserve more attention." -Wall Street Journal "Hearing Chatham's solo music thorugh home speakers is deeply moving... The evolution of Chatham's music may move too fast to see, but one can still bear witness." -The New York City Jazz Record "(Chatham) understands that great sounds and altered states result when simplicity gives rise to complexity. Whether he gets that result by having a legion of guitars play a simple passage or dropping a few notes he played himself into a chain of delays, he knows how to get those sounds to bloom like a flower and flare like a supernova.." -Dusted "A deftly constructed piece... A fingerpicking style inspired by John Fahey has been influential here. The higher notes rain down, anchored by a low, slow fundamental. The harmonics shift into place, and by the time a drone has smeared the sound into a mass, the work is done." -The Wire (Issue #387, May 2016) "The music is, on its own, fascinating... Pythagorean Dream, in its two-part construction, stands alone as a great composition and performance by Rhys Chatham, a reminder of his ability as a player in his own right and not only a composer or fisher of guitarists." -Popmatters “Rhys Chatham leaves an orchestra-sized audio footprint without any overdubbing or any other musician invo

Martin Bartlett should be a familiar name. As well as working with a who's who of electronic music, he was an inspiring and original thinker, composer, performer and organiser. His music is distinctive for its warmth and fleshiness, for taking joy from the incidental and anecdotal, and it remains a characterful counterpoint to much contemporary electronic music. It is his preoccupation with building aleatoric elements into electronic music that distinguishes his work, and he devised elegant and open interactions for instrumental performers and computer-controlled synthesizers. This included building his own electronic devices, and extensive work on the Buchla 400. Born in Croydon in 1939, he was adopted as a baby, and later moved with his family to Canada. He did a short stint in the Navy and completed a music degree at the University of British Columbia, studying under Barbara Pentland, before going on to study composition at Mills College in the late 60s. In 1973 Bartlett and seven others founded the Western Front in Vancouver – a cultural cooperative, gallery and performance space that still exists today, housed in the old meeting hall of the Knights of Pythias (a mason-like fraternity). He continued with his research and teaching, and in 1982 was made professor at Simon Fraser University where he remained for the rest of his life. His performances were often collaborative – for the Western Front's second anniversary in 1975 he devised the four-channel piece One Piece for Everyone, a composition where he prepared and cooked a cauliflower curry on a table connected to a synthesizer he had built, while reading from texts on food. When the curry was cooked, the piece ended, and everyone was fed. Bartlett was a prolific writer, and he expresses himself in fresh, lucid, and wonderfully descriptive prose, offering clear thinking on social aspects of electronic music performance; on the barriers between the performer and the 'black box' and on possibilities for organic systems in electronic music. He also wrote accounts of his sailing trips, treatise on performance practices, and technical academic articles on the systems he built, along with the incandescent manifesto-like piece Electronic Recalcitrant, in which he hoped that electronic music would be imbued with “organic codes of growth and metamorphosis” so that he could “pluck elegant and fleshy electronic sound fish from the frothy algorithmic sea of possibilities”. Key influences were Pauline Oliveros, John Cage and David Tudor, all whom he studied under. Like many of his generation, he became interested in non-Western compositional and philosophical practices, and in 1981 he travelled to India to study Carnatic vocal music with V. Lakshminarayana Iyer in Madras and then on to Burma, Thailand and Indonesia where he studied shadow theatre. He studied South Asian music with Pandit Pran Nath, gamelan with K.R.T. Wasitidipuro, and closely collaborated with Don Buchla on live performances and synthesiser design. He was particularly interested in the Javanese gamelan, which led to him founding the Vancouver Community Gamelan in 1986. On his travels to Indonesia he made hours of field recordings, many of which are accompanied by vivid narrations on the rituals and ceremonies he was documenting. It is unclear why Bartlett’s work remains unknown. Perhaps it is because it remained largely inside the academy. Perhaps his commitment to live performance and community activity means it was more transient than the work of others. Perhaps his openness about his sexuality played a part in his music not receiving much recognition – one can only speculate. But correspondence in his archive shows that rejection and general lack of interest from labels was a source of great personal discontent, leading to Bartlett working again with the Western Front to release his final opus Pythagoras’ Ghost shortly before his death. Bartlett died young, of AIDS-related causes, in 1993, but his music remains a rich source of inspiration, and is characterised by an irresistible and unselfconscious charm that renders his sound unique. These selections, along with the companion LP Anecdotal Electronics, and Luke Fowler’s film Electro-Pythagoras, aim to redress this prior neglect, shedding light on this little known personality from electronic music history, who still has so much to say. Arc Light Editions was formed by ex-Wire magazine staffer Jennifer Lucy Allan and James Ginzburg as a reaction to the over-priced and deluxed-out reissue market. Our releases are packaged simply in kraftliner stock and are reasonably priced. We do not release anything we cannot listen to on repeat for weeks at a time, or which we do not believe is totally essential.   less

Musician and field recordist Action Pyramid finds magic in the everyday on Mardle, a compelling and confounding suite of hydrophone compositions revealing the sonic 24-hour cycle of the UK’s freshwater ponds. Rooted in Jack Greenhalgh’s sonic research on pond biodiversity, Mardle brings to the surface the delicate sounds of aquatic insect stridulations, plant respiration and photosynthesis - an ecology of otherworldly rhythms and alien hyper-sounds that feel more like early synth experiments than biological processes. As Greenhalgh explains, “It's so exciting that we've discovered the woodland bird song dawn chorus equivalent for ponds, in the form of nocturnal aquatic insect choruses at night-time, and the whining of aquatic plants as they photosynthesise like busy factories during the midday sun.” In doing so, Mardle takes the daily cycle as its compositional cue. Beginning above water, the listener is plunged into a “strange and mysterious” world, peaking in the frenzied, pulsing activity of midday and midnight, before the calm of the early morning rain returns above. Inspired by Jana Winderen’s creative underwater soundscapes, the result is quietly breath-taking. “To actually consider the living presence of plants with direct sonic evidence is quite profound,” Action Pyramid says. “It's such an evocative way to capture people's attention and highlight these fragile and maligned habitats. There have definitely been moments where I think I can’t believe I'm listening to this.” Accompanied by detailed liner notes that explain Greenhalgh’s findings and the implications of acoustic ecology in freshwater monitoring, Mardle is a perspective-shifting, mind-expanding missive from the shallows of one the most familiar and overlooked ecologies on Earth.

Recorded at Incus HQ, London, in October 2010, this duo is a delight that should refresh even the most jaded ears. Lol Coxhill and Alex Ward are both veteran improvisers and regular participants on the London scene, so it was inevitable that they would eventually play together as a duo. As evidenced below by YouTube, that happened in August 2010 at John Russell's annual Fete Qua Qua; the pairing was repeated the following month at Sybil Madrigal's monthly Boat Ting gig on the Thames (on the occasion of Madrigal's birthday, actually). After they repeated the success of their previous meeting, it was clear that the two should record together—so Karen Brookman asked them if they would for Incus; without hesitation, they each agreed. The pairing of Coxhill and Ward is a far from obvious one. Despite Coxhill being the senior partner by over forty years, without forewarning it would be difficult to tell that from their music; both sound remarkably spry and lively—one of the joys of the duo. Just as important to its success is the instrumentation; Coxhill's soprano saxophone and Ward's clarinet are close enough in pitch to be highly compatible, yet their timbres are different enough for the two to be easily distinguishable, their individual contributions easy to separate. In addition, each plays their instrument straight, with no electronics or other effects, meaning that this is a text book example of good old-fashioned improv." Coxhill and Ward have playing styles that are remarkably similar, making them highly compatible as improvising partners. They each play free-flowing lines, seeking to compose spontaneous melodies, something at which they are often successful. For much of the time on these seven tracks, the two improvise simultaneously, following parallel paths that intertwine and interact, with neither leading nor following the other. By the slightest of adjustments they respond to and accommodate each other in subtle ways, giving the strong impression that telepathy is at work. A delight from start to finish.(All About Jazz)

Double Bass – John Edwards Drums, Cymbal, Mixed By – Steve Noble Organ [Hammond C3] – Alexander Hawkins Recorded at Eastcote Studios London 20/03/09.

JOHN EDWARDS: double bass JOHN BUTCHER: tenor & soprano saxophones MARK SANDERS: percussion Released on Relative Pitch records "These three hugely experienced British improvisers have played together in various duo formations and other groups over the years. but, strangely enough, this is their first ever trio date. With players of this calibre — all working at the very pinnacle of European improv — it hardly matters: the level of rapport and collective virtuosity is astonishing, as the trio negotiates rapidly transforming moodscapes with attentive and playful creativity. While there's often a bullish energy at work — particularly when Butcher plays tenor — the improvisations effectively steer clear of any predictable free-jazz tropes, largely thanks to the extended techniques that lie at the heart of all three musicians’ lexicons: Butcher's tightly controlled trills, whistles and wispy overblowing; Edwards’ thick-fingered, globular plucks and porcine arco snorks; Sanders’ miniature pings and rattles and Papyrus brush shuffles. Veering from punchy confrontation to breath-held spacious emptiness via distant rumble-gong-shimmer, each track — the longest clocking in at nearly 18 minutes — contains more ideas than most other bands’ entire albums." Jazzwise - Daniel Spicer

Recorded at The Moat, London on 15 February 2002

Recorded live at Teatro Giulio Cesare on March 28, 1980, comprising an astounding 27 compositions, including the highly celebrated “Astro Black”, “Mr. Mystery”, “Romance of Two Planets”, “Space Is the Place”, “We Travel the Spaceways”, and “Calling Planet Earth”, over six vinyl sides. High among the greatest live gigs by the Arkestra captured on tape, carefully mastered by Matt Bordin at Outside Inside Studio, “Live in Rome 1980” is a near perfect snapshot of the band’s versatility and range, including many of their most notably and famous songs, as well as striking renditions of the Horace Henderson penned Benny Goodman number “Big John’s Special”, Fletcher Henderson’s “Yeah Man!”, and “Limehouse Blues”, displaying Ra’s willingness to address and rework the entire, diverse history of jazz in a single go. Heard in its totality, perhaps what makes “Live in Rome 1980” most striking is the way in which the concert plays out. Roughly the first half encounters the band locked in some of the most out-there, free jazz fire that can be imagined, weaving a startling sense of interplay and furious energy into a brilliant tapestry of writhing sonority, the likes of which were only really achieved by this band. The second half, with only moments of exception that return to the furious energy of the first, is very different affair, easy toward the vocal standards, led by June Tyson’s vocals and the joyous collective chanting of the band, for which they have become so widely celebrated, threading the sounds of off-kilter big band swing with heavy grooves and imagines of outer space.

A mysterious sound aurora on the magical paths of the infinite universe of percussion, originally released in 1985 and then almost completley lost. The well-educated drummer Tiziano Tononi, together with David Searcy and Jonathan Scully, while working at the temple of classical music, Il Teatro alla Scala of Milano decides to realize a personal compendium of sounds using only purcussion instruments. The recording offers to us an amazing concert of sounds with acoustic purity, in perfect balance between wild rhythm and deep relaxation. Ecstatic elements of Japan ambient minimalism dialogue with contemporary musical solutions (Varese, Ligeti), in the stream of a harmonious fusion of ancient and modern. It’s a propitiatory ceremony of supernatural happenings that open portals of blissfulness, tribal and shamanic darkness, and,timeless jungles. Between amazon fires and African safaris, we float in the Asian rivers of meditation, lost in water games, echoes of caves and rocks in the night, synergies of frogs, birds, snakes, marimbas, chimes, gongs, and wooden drums.

Double LP version. Four long and vaporous unreleased tracks that document the Juri Camisasca's first mystical afflatus, bringing to light the moments of "collective meditation" of some events in 1978, including the recordings drawn from the exhibition "L'evoluzione interiore dell'Uomo", which took place at the Villa Reale in Monza. After his participation in the Telaio Magnetico project in 1975, and in parallel to his contribution in works like Franco Battiato's Juke Box (1978) and Lino Capra Vaccina's Antico Adagio (1978), and in Raul Lovisoni and Francesco Messina's Prati Bagnati Del Monte Analogo (1979), a more general syntony of Camisasca for different aspects of Eastern philosophies seemed to conceive his first personal form of music as a "celestial ocean" in which to break the eternal divine love. The mantra nature of deep drones of a natural reverberated harmonium literally introduce you to another level of consciousness; harmonic chants of dhrupad inspiration expanding the ethereal voice in the transcendental plot of all, while Roberto Mazza's oboe intervenes to paint this perfect osmotic sound echoing motifs of ancient medieval saltarello. For Camisasca, "the vibration of sound is something primordial which contains the mystery of creation"; and in this sense "the musician is a medium through which the Nature is expressed". This makes Evoluzione Interiore an intense minimalist work where singing generates a universal and archetypical spiral of purity and candor that suggests the Pandit Pran Nath's lesson as well as dialogues in concept with the mutability flux of seminal works as Terry Riley's Persian Surgery Dervishes (1972), Peter Michael Hamel's The Voice of Silence (1973) and Nada (1977), or with research on the overtones as that of Roberto Laneri's Prima Materia. Includes liner notes with archival photos.

Orpheus Variations is a new composition by Alvin Lucier for solo cello and seven wind instruments. It is based on a particular sonority from the first movement of Igor Stravinsky’s ballet score, Orpheus; a sonority that has haunted Lucier for decades.  Orpheus Variations is one of eight large-scale compositions made expressly for Charles Curtis by Alvin Lucier in the last 15 years. This performance was conducted by Petr Kotik, with Charles Curtis playing solo cello alongside members of the SEM Ensemble. “Lucier speaks first of a sonority, and only then of a chord. He discusses the chord, its notes and their disposition, but what haunts him is a “particular sonority.” A sonority is the product of physical action on physical materials: the instruments, the registers in which they are activated, the breath of the musicians, the waveforms thus produced, their merging and interfering, and finally the moment and place of these actions. An energy field, certain to vanish completely once the musicians put down their instruments. However concrete and real the actions and materials, the sonority they produce is a phantom.”